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Private Sydney: Is Rove the next Rove?

Private Sydney: Is Rove the next Rove?

Its been some time since Australia has had a top rating late night chat show, and now the race is on to recreate the format for a new generation. Will Rove come back? If not, who could succeed? Andrew Hornery investigates.

AACTA Awards: uncomfortable moments

Rock icon David Bowie dead at 69

David Bowie has died following a battle with cancer, just days after celebrating his 69th birthday and releasing his final album, Blackstar.

The song in which a 21-year-old wannabe wrote the coded script for his fantastic future. Major Tom encapsulated David Bowie's personal isolation and longing for transcendence, couched in impossible drama and a rapturous melody that rode the finest line between mortal despair and superhuman triumph. Aliens are probably still trying to figure out some of those chords.

Incredible talent and creativity... David Bowie performs at the Sydney Entertainment Centre in 2003. His songs will live on. Photo: Domino Postiglione

Same stultifying suburban depression, different day — with an effortless gender switch signifying much to come. Bowie slipped under the skin of a little girl escaping to the movies only to find the cliches of the times sadly lacking. With its myriad chords used in similar fashion to My Way and the orchestral grandeur of its chorus wringing rage and pathos in equal measure, it's the kind of pop masterpiece only a true artist would never attempt to repeat.

In the ingenuous guise of omnisexual alien guitar hero Ziggy Stardust, Bowie flipped the switch from yearning earthling to cosmic revelation incarnate. Simultaneously a sci-fi invention from planet Nowhere and a real-life alter ego of his maker, Ziggy beamed in through thin air to every bedroom on Earth: a universal link to the shared tribe that every lonely fanboy / girl dreams of.

The characters were ch-ch-changeable but the cold dread of marching time, mortality and a family history of mental illness ("too many suicides for my liking") snapped at the heels of each of Bowie's incarnations. Cloaked in the foreboding cadences of Weimar cabaret and haunted by the faces of lost friends, Aladdin Sane stared into an abyss both ravishing and terrifying.

The decadent, quasi-operatic heart of the post-apocalyptic Diamond Dogs album was a triptych of cheap thrills in the gutters of decaying civilisation. Hey, gorgeous tune though. When he sang "We'll buy some drugs and watch a band/ then jump in the river holding hands," art sounded just one precarious step ahead of life.

Style was always a given, but the content of Bowie's US breakthrough was no less staggering. His audacious appropriation of sinewy black funk was hitched to a scathing rejection of the stuff that he had craved all his life: a ferocious act of soul-scraping that its co-writer John Lennon might have envied.

When Bowie let the mask slip, there was usually another underneath. But deep in trouble with cocaine and the occult in Los Angeles, there was clearly someone more desperate than the cool, cruel Thin White Duke crying "Lord, I kneel and offer you my word on a wing". Sure he was a good actor. But not that good.

"Pale blinds drawn all day / Nothing to read, nothing to say". They were among the few lyrics on Bowie's most forbidding act of reinvention. Low was a largely instrumental album built on a Berlin wall of synthesisers and a thwacking great drum sound that echoes through electronic music still. Retreat never sounded so much like progress.

The stunning act of abdication that drew a perfect circle around the decade that would be forever Bowie. Major Tom was a junkie, the pierrot was revealed and the video pretty much invented the '80s as a parting gift. Now, to hell with art. Let's Dance.

After a decade of silence, the brief final phase of Bowie's creative life was unveiled with this deeply melancholy surprise. A song of heartbreaking nostalgia, it insisted nonetheless on a context of here and now.

Lazarus is the chilling title of the last single he would see released. But the unspeakably dark title track of Bowie's final album is the one that describes the world he left behind. Given his uncanny prescience for nearly half a century, its horror images of demagogues and executions in the dim enlightenment of "a solitary candle" is a resonant culmination of a life of grave visions and magnificent sounds.